


Lost Boys

by darkrabbit



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Mystery, Piracy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-17
Packaged: 2017-10-17 00:28:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 8,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkrabbit/pseuds/darkrabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: In the darkness of space, a hand reaches for a hold against the emptiness... but what will holding bring? The melody of last despair or the sanctity of lasting promise?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started this several years ago for my LJ friend, DoctorsDiva. I hope she's okay... haven't heard from her in forever. Luvs ya DD!

 

 

Jack Harkness could feel the blood running down his leg. It wouldn’t be far now, the room where they were keeping _him_ , the heart of the Xja ship. His wrist strap was feeding him latitudes more often as he came closer to the Drive Chamber, the telltale lines on the tiny readout screen the only signal that he was going in the right direction. He reached out a hand...

 

 

THUNK! Kirrrrrsh-whoomp.

 

 

One well-placed chop and grab, and the first of many of the latest wave of bugs lay dead at his feet. He didn’t have time to do it gently. What was it the Doctor had quoted the other day? Jack smiled as he remembered the phrase over a pile of Xja kirschwassern, cyberized scouts that could tear apart an army in moments, given enough room to move. In these narrow corridors, they were easy pickings for someone like him. Odd how there seemed to be no contingency for intership attacks in their floor plan. The high frequency scraping sound that filled the Xja ship, the sound of Xja speech, had disoriented him when he’d first heard it; he could only imagine how it must have sounded for the man he was looking for.

 

 

hwooooo!

 

 

All at once, the bing of gravity doors swooping back into recesses took his attention.

 

 

The large portals sliced backward before him and jumped into hidden catches within the walls. _Big doors,_ he thought, wondering idly at the architecture of the place, a writhing mass of wires and plating. Very clinical, and the rooms were growing cooler, a side effect of the increased amount of mercury running through the conduits. He was so close now. The mercury proved it.

 

 

Too empty. No Xja to guard an inner chamber? No. Surely not. And it was dark? The bugs had watched too many Old Earth holovids. A five year old could have outwitted these oversized flycatchers! But still, a trap within a trap was not uncommon where the Doctor was concerned. Jack pulled his Webley from its holster and the plasma stiletto he’d hidden in his... and clung to the doorframe, and waited. The Xja should have come running to the smell of the mandible bite on his leg. They were cannibals, after all. Didn’t matter whose it was, so long as they had meat. He thought of the Doctor that day, when the man had been yammering on about Disney movies. He was going to ask him about what he’d said, the exact phrase, yeah. That would be the first thing out of his mouth when they saw each other. Laughing out loud, he entered the freezing room. The blue of wall mounted sodium lights buzzed on, mixing in a bit of sulfur with the smell of foreign flesh and burning ichor.

 

 

A single bug stood between him and his quarry. Jack raised his gun, his plasma knife gaining height with each unsteady breath prey and predator shared. Hesitation was an unnatural thing, for him. Would it be the same for the small Xja standing between him and the Doctor?

 

 

Centuries before, he wouldn’t have allowed such a thought as was forming now to enter his mind.

 

 

That was before he had met the Doctor, before he’d been forever changed.

 

 

Now he found that one thought filling his brain.

 

 

_Had he been wrong?_

 

 

More thoughts followed, less sharp, more hesitant. The enemy could have gained several rooms on him by the time he took a second breath, yet still the thoughts kept coming.

 

 

_Was it a child? Had he emptied the ship of all the able adult Xja?_

The ring of the Xja Continuum was silent in his ears as he stared across the close corridor into the violet eyes of a man-sized white mantid.

 

 

It was shivering, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? If he had killed children, he’d have more than his own guilt to worry about. He’d hand the Doctor his Webley, cleaned and loaded, if it came to that.

 

 

_You... mustn’t blame... self Jack. You didn’t... all trying... kill you. Don’t... in here. Just don’t. Trust... child. His name... Yahs._

 

 

The Doctor was in his head. Barely. In all the years they’d known each other, Jack had never known the Time Lord to break that trust without cause. The man never did _anything_ without cause. It was bad, then.

Jack stiffened, not caring if the young Xja saw him falter in that moment. But then the mantid did a strange thing. It waved a long white claw and stepped aside, still trembling, its slender mandibles clicking and whirring away in a chorus of Xjandian words he couldn’t decipher. Which brought up another question.

 

 

Where was the TARDIS? Was she missing? Or was she nearby, and the Doctor simply too weak to complete the circuit?

 

 

Either way, he reasoned as he nodded to the Xja and lowered his weapons, preparing to follow it into the cylinder of rotating anterooms that formed the ship’s propulsive core, there was one sure way to find out.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Nestled in his crèche like a giant cog wheel, the Doctor looked at and down and through the workings of the alien ship that had become his world. Buff as his birth day and splayed in place above a massive telepathic relay console in a far less flattering version of Da Vinci’s Vetruvian Man, he found himself thinking of fudge brownie recipes as the sodium lights flicked on in that same unnerving blue that reminded a body of an interrogation room from a bad B movie.

 

 

The smell of sulphur... ah. It was reminiscent of farm air and rocky ledges and fishing... never had done much fishing with Susan, though he must have promised her. But then, he’d promised her a lot of things. One blink, another, and a tear came rolling sideways across his face, down over his chin as the Wheel turned, the immense Drive Matrix rotating to allow one of the entry doors to open.

 

 

He closed his eyes; reached. Softly touching, again he entered the thicker than average protective bubble around Jack Harkness’s mind. His whispered touch made the man start, but the Captain was a quick learner who’d had training in this sort of thing.

 

 

_Up here, Jack. That’s it, a little closer and you’ve got it! Brilliant!_

They stared at each other’s faces for a while; it was only natural, Jack having walked in behind Yahs, expecting his friend’s handsome face only to see the man’s gangly form in a shiny silver cocoon of quasi-corporeal orificial plugs and findings high above him, connected to something resembling a cyberpunkesque Catherine Wheel.

 

 

Having seen all this, it was thankfully something less of a shock when the Doctor descended from his metallic chrysalis on an undulating wave of psionic pipings, ten tiny cords of silver energy that hooked him to the machine. At least there was a bit of Xja bubbling covering his naughty bits, otherwise Jack would have had a coronary, to say nothing of himself. That would have been a given.

 

 

“So, Doctor,” started Jack, once he had taken in everything he’d cared to for the moment, “How’s it hanging?”

 

 

The Doctor’s shriek echoed across the Thousand Corridors, the namesake moniker that defined the cylindrical behemoth of the Xja engine core. He _was_ the engine, their only power source. The only thing in the universe keeping the ship from floating off, now.

 

 

As his nose and mouth were currently intubated by an artron-conversion feeding plug, he spoke telepathically once more, easing into Jack’s mind so carefully. Then again, the experience was always a little like making love to someone special. He knew Jack loved him, horribly, terribly, unflinchingly; had known it and done nothing to soothe the man for far longer than was proper. And here he was, dangling like an erotic butterfly in a psychedelic web.

 

 

Suddenly, a word slid along his defenses.

 

 

_Mmmm. Erotic butterfly, eh? Why Doctor, how very kinky of you._

 

 

Their eyes stayed locked for a moment longer; the Lord of Time could feel Jack’s mind skirting along his own, searching as well as a human could for signs of strain that would never be visible outside it.

 

 

_Jack, this is no time for your multi-faceted artistry of the carnal antic.  I need you._

 

 

The Doctor could almost feel Jack flinch at the word. Need. The man had a soldier’s honed instinct, after all, and, if there was anything his massive Time Lord brain wanted very much to forget yet never could quite manage, it was the inevitable, incessant, inconveniently endearing desire of every single Companion he’d ever had to mother him like a brooding hen. He watched with his mind as the iceberg tip of deep caring Jack never bothered to truly mask slid across the man’s face at that single word.

 

 

Then a soft smile snuck up on him as he studied his friend. The man had understood him perfectly, of course, and was now busying himself with his wrist strap.

 

 

“Well, Doctor, you know I love a challenge. Shall I put on the red silk before or after we take dinner? I’m feeling limber... ” Jack’s eyes locked on the feeding tube, a frown shifting into place across his school-boyish baby blues. But it never reached his lips. He just... sat down on the grates below and lay back, looking up at his own personal blue yonder.

 

 

_How much time, Doc? How much time did it take for the Time Lord before you to die?_

 

 

 

In his mind, the Doctor smiled down at Jack Harkness, once more in awe of the human’s ability to look straight through him when it counted. But there were no more moments to spare. He eased toward the floor grates slowly, watching Jack watch him, and soon his last act as the Puppeteer of the engine core was to let go of it all, to drift and hope and place his faith in the one man who could save the Xja from a swift death among the stars.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Yahs watched the man watch the Time Lord. The Lord had self-ejected from the Puppeteer’s Scaffold as if birthed. As he exited the monstrous metal womb, his thin, wet frame tumbled down in a lacy gob of mercury like some macabre marionette, and the energetic connects evacuated the flesh of his back in red upward-climbing streaks. Strands of the silver fluid snaked backward into their recesses, and then the ship began to shake with a monstrous rattle as tiny bolts and cogs and gravity-less globules of mercury jiggled free of their holdings and flew across the room.

 

 

The man called Jack was clutching the Time Lord as though he were a newly-hatched nymph; Then Jack turned, looked blankly in Yahs’s direction, and climbed into the crèche the Time Lord had vacated. The Time Lord remained still on the grates, just as the man had lain him for a moment, until finally, as the man called Jack disappeared inside the Puppeteer’s Scaffold, a trembling word broke the surfeit of calm that had washed the room in silence.

 

 

“Ow.”

 

 

Yahs came to the Lord and knelt, forcing his powerful back legs behind him as he lowered himself, then, forward claws trembling, he reached down and slipped them carefully beneath.

 

 

“Yahs… yiliyk na’tui; huasuh na’hiit. ” the Lord spoke Xjantu gently, despite the catch in his throat. Obviously, he was quite dangerously dehydrated from his time within the crèche. The intubation must have injured something, or it could have plugged up, or snagged somewhere deep in the mechanism. Regardless of the Lord’s soft reassurances, there would be unpleasant infections to check for, expected and unexpected injuries to note, let amounts to be gauged and leaks to be patched.

 

 

Yahs shivered as he clasped his one remaining abdominal limb around the Lord’s waist and heaved, pulling his charge into a sitting position long enough to survey the damage done by all those little invasions.

 

 

His Lord was thin, perhaps too thin, but then the Scaffold was meant for someone younger… of the same race, but not so. The rigging of the Scaffold had been created in desperation, a passing Time Lord’s brilliant attempt to stabilize the corroded drive when the last Xja telepath had fallen victim to the Sleeping Rot. But that Time Lord had died in the crèche. And, at the last, in nature’s own desperation, the Remaining had eaten her.

 

 

But not before many of them starved to death in refusal to do so.

 

 

The starfaring vessels of the Xja traversed the cosmos by refining the mental radiation of the Xja themselves, which during a certain span of time within the stellar year -when their collective minds rose up from their flesh and became a river of song- was rich in Artron energy. But the Time Lords… they lived with it inside them… the blood of the Xja fleet saturated the nerve fibres of their brains. Indeed, the saturation penetrated everything about a Time Lord.

 

 

And cannibalism was expected, even encouraged in Xja society. But there were stiff rules about piracy and consumption without consent, especially when the victim or criminal were Off-Shippers like the Lord and his Boekind companion, Harkness.

 

 

Strange that the Sleepers in the Holds had never thought to guard against pirates cropping up amongst their own kind. And stranger still that the Sleepers had not been touched.

 

 

Then the strangest thing of all had transpired, Yahs thought to himself about what the Lord had asked him earlier, just as the pirates were being… disposed of. The Lord had asked him to wake the Sleepers, which, once the Lord had forced ejection from the Scaffold, would eventually have taken the entire ship offline, not just the auxiliaries… and unless the Lord’s friend could somehow perform miracles, those Sleepers and their dreams were the only thing powering the rest of the ship. Yahs had long since lost contact with the other three flyers. The last transmissions had been joint, a shared signal originating from the Observatory Flyer Murshelk and the Stores Ship Alphidy, almost three pulsar-blinks in the past.

 

 

Still, though Yahs trusted the Lord implicitly, there was a small niggle of worry that refused evacuation from his sense of self.

 

                                                       

Why had the Pirates appeared in the first place?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pronunciations:
> 
> Xja: shj-yaa
> 
> Yahs… yiliyk na’tui, huasuh na’hiit.:
> 
> YAAS… yih-LEEK NAA tuu-ii; HU-ah-SUU na-HEET
> 
> Yahs… please trust him, just as you trust me.


	4. Chapter 4

 Yahlasindrintalaasidvora.

 

 

She had been a good woman, a temporal philosopher of modest standing. Not a Prydonian like himself, but a Blyledge. The first Blyledge out of House Dvora in centuries. He’d been secretly proud when he’d heard what her choice had been.

 

 

She’d called herself The Caretaker.

 

 

From the looks of things, Yahlas had taken extraordinarily good care of the Xja… until they’d eaten her because of the supposed food shortage.

 

 

Wait. Xja were cannibals. They didn’t need food stores!

 

 

Groaning somewhat, the Doctor pressed his fingers into Yahs’ white arm, the one holding him down, and tried to speak.

 

 

“Glg! Rrrr…”

 

 

“What is it, Theta Sigma?” said the Xja, laying one soft inner claw alongside the Time Lord’s face, “… tell us what you need.”

 

 

The Time Lord’s eyes grew wide then, so wide Yahs thought he might be going into shock from the stasis-locked preservant mercury. But then he just sank back to the grates and closed his eyes.

 

 

“Yahs… where did you get your name?”

 

 

Yahs flicked his inner eyelids over his eyes and gazed down at his Gallifreyan charge.

 

 

“I was born on the Second Moon Day of Dzt, in the year of Ystylan. Why do you ask?”

 

 

The Doctor blinked and sat up once again, his deep, calm stare boring ahead of itself as though he were drilling for oil.

 

 

“I was just wondering… didn’t Lady Yalahsindrintalaasidvora disappear on the Second Moon Day of Dzt?”

 

 

“Yes,” Yahs said softly, allowing his outer mandibles to clap together in a decisive if belated quiet click, “… and then she was eaten by the Mindless Ones. Are you asking a question of me?”

 

 

The Doctor’s eyes narrowed; surely he couldn’t be that slow. Surely! With a sigh, he sat up and craned his neck toward the heavens, where Jack was busy testing the telepathic overlays that ran to and from the Main Console.

 

 

“I imagine I am, Yahs my boy. Although, I am uncertain which one as yet. How is Jack?”

 

 

Yahs turned, straightened his long, milk-translucent fat-thoraxed Walking Stick body and looked askance at the Time Lord.

 

 

“I do not believe you are as slow as you claim, Theta Sigma. You are much like her. And your companion is doing well. His continual generation of Artron is very useful in filling the stores. Soon it will be time to change the feeding tubes, however, we will need to change the feeding tubes soon, else they will become clogged as they did with you.”

 

 

Then the Doctor said something strange, something that made Jack’s Time Agent senses do triple lutzes in his head.

 

 

The Time Lord said, very simply, “I don’t eat enough to facilitate their use. He doesn’t need those, either. Just take them out. It will save approximately 500.6270213 units of potential energy.”

 

 

Yahs’ head twitched to the left and back again; he had not expected such callousness.

 

 

But the Doctor merely continued on.

 

 

“He will die, and then come back. The Artron will build during that period. He cannot stay dead; that much is clear. Therefore, until we reach your destination, he shall remain inside the Scaffold, powering the Ships, if there are any left besides this one. Do you have enough power to initiate an all frequency sweep for the other vessels, Yahs?”

 

 

It was then that Jack, as he watched the Doctor ignore him utterly, remembered a certain Latin phrase he had come to appreciate in his younger years.

 

_Umbra Ex Machina._

If he could have shivered, he would have.

 

 

\----

 

 

The Doctor felt strange.

 

 

At least he would have, had he still been in his body.

 

 

He was, in a manner of speaking, observing the source of the scraping now, through the midship external cameras. Jack must have entered the crèche within the Puppeteer’s Scaffold by now… he had to find a way to let him know that his body was otherwise engaged.

 

 

He had his suspicions as to who, and the source of the scraping had confirmed it. He would deal with getting his body back later.

 

 

Stuck between the outer wall of the Drive Chamber and one of the propulsive gears, there was a space suit… he’d found it while angling the camera to get a better view of the double shell of the bulkhead seams.

 

 

And there had been a body inside the suit. He had to let Jack know. It seemed a scene out of a book he’d read once, except that he’d seen it happen far too many times for it to ever be just a story. A colonist tortured at the hands of another colonist, usually a space mad, ambitious zealot, while they both watch from afar, doomed to eternity, as the survivors crash to the planet to start a new life.

 

 

It was –admittedly- rather freeing to be a mind without a body; well, the ship was his body for the moment, technically speaking, although since it wasn’t alive, he had his doubts whether it would be inviting him back.

 

 

What concerned him most was the question of why, because he really thought he already knew the who. He was staring at her.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

Yalahsindrintalaasidvora reached up with one hand to brush back the spiky mop of hair that was not hers and sighed with borrowed lungs. She rather hated having to do this to her mentor, but there was no other choice. She couldn’t let the murderer escape, even if it meant all their lives…

 

 

She hadn’t even had time to tell him before the-

 

 

‘I know you aren’t the Doctor,’ thought a voice in her head.

 

 

She stiffened; a bramblebush of gold with long, twisted thorns named Wrong and Pain and Death grew in the sight of her borrowed brain, shallow roots climbing carefully across years of dust to reach her where she dwelt among the bodies her Teacher had buried in his soul. Rassilon, she was even one of them. Sighing mentally, she watched the blossom grow toward her, spilling whole thoughts here, fragments there, carefully concealed in a nice big ribbon of falsely casual telepathy. But this mind was trained, agile. For a human anyway. And humans hadn’t truly gained that talent till the 51st century…

 

 

‘Hello, Captain Jack Harkness,’ she thought, letting her words echo through the Doctor’s skull, ‘And now I know you know. Someone murdered me. My Teacher is trapped inside the Ship. Go find him if you want to know more.’

 

 

The flower paused in its unfolding; obviously this human’s mind was a bit quicker than normal, whatever happened to make it so Wrong notwithstanding.

 

 

‘I see. Harm the Doctor and I’ll find a way to harm you, if he doesn’t survive this. Where can I find your Teacher?’

 

 

She laughed aloud, which caused the human’s head to turn just so toward her.

 

 

‘He is observing my body, which is stuck in the wiring outside the Hull. It’s near one of the landing lights. Don’t make me lead you by the hand, little human.’

 

Yahlas was surprised by the sound that followed next. Perhaps it had been too long since she’d heard a voice like his, but when he laughed at her, this strange, Wrong little human, she felt… nice. There was really no other word to describe it.

 

 

She lifted her finger, reached. Her hand could almost touch Jack Harkness’ cheek. She could feel the light in him, gleaming, growing. She could feel his time lines, squirreling around, converging like locusts at so many points in history and future. And present. He was like a… what had the Doctor called it? A Christmas Tree.

 

Suddenly, the man’s mouth moved, biting, gnashing uncontrollably. His blue eyes flashed open, like the sodium lights in the corridors of the Ship. Words came, like drops of blood in the dirt, soaking up the silence as little red sponges.

 

 

“Don’t touch me with those hands.”

 

 

Then, she understood many things, in that one moment.

 

 

One, that Jack Harkness loved the Doctor more than she did.

 

 

Two; that she would have to die again.

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

Jack stared with cold eyes at the woman who now wore the Doctor’s body like a suit. He’d always done ice queen exceptionally well. And, of course, the Doctor warranted only the best of Captain Harkness’s many talents with tongue and tong… and thong.

 

 

“Well, now that we’ve established sufficient professional boundary, what do you need? The quicker you’re satisfied, the quicker the Doctor gets back to his –real- job.”

 

 

She smiled, curling the Doctor’s lips like a pro in the ghost of an alien sunrise; Yahs was standing like a mute referee between the two of them, calmly turning first to one side, then the other, back and forth. It reminded Jack of an old Earth comedy skit… ‘Who’s on First?’

 

 

“… I need you to ask me the questions you need to ask me. Is that suitable, Jack?”

 

 

Jack Harkness remained unimpressed. “And don’t call me Jack. It’s Captain Harkness to you, until you prove you aren’t out to kill my friend out there. I’ve only known of one Time Lord able to switch bodies like you claim, and his name was The Master.”

 

 

Yahlas blinked. “Was? So he’s… gone then? Really gone?”

 

 

That threw him; he honestly thought she would care. “Yeah, he ah, had a bit of a problem with the Doc back on Sol.”

 

 

She curved the Doctor’s lips again, this time in relief, summoning a grin that seemed devoid of all female guile. “I had hoped he could be saved. But at least now he won’t hurt anyone else with his childish petulance. Thank Good for that.”

 

 

It was Jack’s turn to smirk, despite the surprise he felt. For now, that response was enough to share a few juicy bits. “He –was- saved, according to the Doctor. He stepped in front of Rassilon’s rod to save him, just as the Doctor was sending the Lord President and his entourage back to their proper timeframe. He fried the old goat, too, but good. I…I lost a lover not long before. The Doctor doesn’t know.” He sighed and looked away, hoping she would think he was letting his guard down. “He would have wanted to come, to save all those children and as many lives as possible, but… he was pregnant at the time…wouldn’t have been right to risk his life and unborn child like that, just for a little blue marble in the back waters of Sol System.”

 

 

Yahlas considered this, or pretended to, before she spoke again with those beautiful lips that weren’t hers. Irrationally, Jack found himself wanting to hit her.

 

 

“I see. Even still, don’t you think the Doctor might have wanted to make that decision on his own?”

 

 

Jack breathed, his exhalation icy in the surprisingly crisp air. Of course the mercury which cooled the Xja ships and served as a liquid method of communicative transfer was refined -properly- to avoid mental decay, but nevertheless the cold was beginning to affect his outer nervous systems. Soon he would die. Again.

 

 

His laugh made the woman who wore the Doctor stiffen and step back. “So which section is he in again?” he said, smiling as his eyes suffered the first in a long wave of petechial hemorrhages, causing blood to drip down his face and freeze like little red petals on his skin.

 

 

Yahlas’ stolen eyes grew wide; without a sound she replaced the feeding tubes and stood back, waiting for the impossible, like any good little Time Lord. How had she ever thought she was worthy of this kind of devotion, this… this kind of love?

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

 

 

Yahs watched Yahlas stand there watching as Jack Harkness splattered into a thousand tiny pieces over the consoles and the walkways and the sodium lights. Drippy pieces of raw Jack slid off the crèche, plopping onto the floor.

 

 

“The power surge seems to have finished the man off,” Yahs said.

 

 

Yahlas looked at Yahs, using the Doctor’s old trick of staring and not blinking.

 

 

“…he should not have tried it. And you and I still have things to discuss. About that time. I ‘will’ find it.”

 

 

“Indeed. As for our… other business, I would rather you not bring up the pirates again, Time Lord,” Yahs clicked at Yahlas, eyes sliding past her to a chunk of steaming Jack stuck to a pipe just to the right of the Doctor’s forelock. It was dangling a tooth.

 

 

“As you like it. I’ll be around. I trust you’ll let me root about, like before, Yahs?”

 

 

Yahlas watched the child walk off, then dug into the crèche, pulling stringy bits of shredded intestine from the mechanisms.

 

 

“Pull yourself together, Harkness,” she breathed with a smile as she climbed in and began reattaching the filtered mercury tubes to the Doctor’s body- her body, for the moment, “I’m going to find him, but you have to keep him alive.”


	8. Chapter 8

Yahs clicked softly down a gang to the Chamber of the Sleepers, his thick thorax light behind him, his long child’s body bouncing spryly on sharp thin legs.

 

 

Tlik tliktliktlik

 

 

Tliktliktlik tlik

 

 

Tlik tliktliktlik

 

 

Tliktliktlik tlik

 

 

The door came up on him, a sudden breath of release, a quick throw of light around a frame of soft greys and pearly slit-like windows.

 

 

He placed a white foreleg against the door, making his flesh solid for an instant.

 

 

T-tlik.

 

 

Scraping his claw against the door lock, he thinned his presence again, then stepped through the door.

 

 

He was dead.

 

 

He needed no lock.

 

 

Wiggling the rest of him through the molecules of the door, he shook his thorax as if to wring water from the tip, then popped the rest of the way into the Sleeper Chamber.

 

 

He looked up to the rows and rows of Sleepers, silvery casings stacked in honeycombs, all around the room; this area was filled with them. He remembered, there used to be the skitter of new hatchlings scampering down below. It was where they’d kept the feeding maze, where the old would sleep in comfort, to be eaten when they could no longer run.

 

 

Tlik, tlik-tlik.

 

 

Tlik.

 

 

Tli…

 

 

Scuuuuuuh.

 

 

Vents. Thousands of vents, flapping open, slapping shut.

 

 

The Time Lord had come, promising salvation from the years without sun, the endless black starvation. The sickly stars that seemed to swim through their heads without rest, blinking away their sanity.

 

 

Yahlasindrintalaasidvora. She had tried. She had built the Scaffold.

 

 

Then the pirates had come. They ravaged all but the Sleeper Chamber.

 

 

She brought them, she must have. They’d only come after the Scaffold failed…

 

 

If he could only access the Sleepers’ memories, but those had been lost to him long before the Doctor had arrived.

 

 

She would not get the Sleepers. She would not get the records.

 

 

The Doctor was kind, but necessity…

 

 

Yahs clicked his forelegs together, rubbing soft hairs before covering his head with both feet and bowing forward.

 

 

“The Doctor must not find the records,” he said to the billion silver tombs, “find him first!”

 

 

Then his body lifted, dissipating into fog that curled into the pipes and tubing, slipping into the cracks of panels, swimming through the streams of filtered mercury coolant toward the Time Lord’s presence outside.

 

 

“There, the thread of his essence!” Yahs exclaimed, bodiless as he flew through the circuitry of the ship toward the outside cams, specifically the fourteenth, “just a little more, and…”

 

 

Inhabiting the number fourteen camera perched on the bend of the roundest part of the hull, near the Drive Chamber, Yahs caught a grainy glimpse of the seventh camera turning opposite the others, sparking a little as it dragged a bit of live wire back and forth across the hull.

 

 

“Closer, closer my kin! What did he find?”

 

 

The camera honed in, taking Yahs with it as the lens retracted outward, focusing, focusing, blurring and refocusing. Soon, dull smoky clouds retreated into blackness ringed in clear light- the lens of a lone camera.

 

A body in a spacesuit.

 

 

“Female of the species…” Yahs muttered, “but she died below… I thought she was lying…”

 

 

Then a wave of unfamiliar feeling crackled through his being, and he surged out of the camera, back into the wires.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

 

“Just a little more,” the Doctor said softly, as the wires dragged free of the post holding the camera with him in it for the twelfth time, flopping just short of the foot of Yahlas’ suit, “just a little bit more and I’ve…got her… got it!”

 

 

Zzbt!

 

 

_“…they’re coming! We can’t… how did they get on the ship?” a Zja woman said, her larger mandibles clicking slightly over each other in a nervous swish._

 

 

Lines of grey static flooded the cam’s visuals; was it airing the flight history? Was that what was playing on the screen now?

 

 

The Doctor listened and watched, the bundle of his electrical impulses increasing their speed in excitement as he hummed around and around in the camera, trying to watch the show while making sure that Yahlas’ suit, now wrapped tightly about the right foot with the loose wires from his camera, wouldn’t be floating off somewhere.

 

 

“Yeesh, it’s hard work playing cowboys up here,” he muttered, shivering in his quarks as a surge of electricity sent another wave of feedback through the receptors, jumping ahead in the record.

 

 

_“Transferring command room visual backup sequence to cams 7, 14, and 16.”_

 

 

_The captain, a large male Xja with bits of grey coloring his carapace, turned to the taller female and said,_

 

_“Who did this? She had no part in…”_

_A younger Xja turned away from the captain, staring down the corridor from the command area._

 

 

_“Her body… what shall we do? We can’t survive this without her…”_

_“… take her body to the children below. In the hour of her death, they will honor her life.”_

_“But sir, they won’t survive! The pirates, they’re… they’re already… bluh!”_

_A white Xja claw dripping pale blood stuffs itself through the younger Xja’s chest as the older woman watches in horror, her mandibles quivering with rage._

_“Captain! They’re here! I…”_

 

 

Words flowed over the cam screen; _manual override engaged from cockpit-_ _switching view position to cameras 14 and 15 and 16._

Something long and grey and curved, the Captain’s claw perhaps, covered the screen suddenly, scrabbling madly over the screen.

 

 

The Doctor flinched, sending the cam into a spiral of useless dragging wires that tugged hard on the foot of Yahlas’ suit, wedging her body even more tightly between the two spires of hull she’d been lodged in.

 

So the captain had… let the pirates on board. Why?

 

 

Suddenly a snapping sound caught his attention, and a shower of sparks form below the cam made him squeak in horror.

 

 

A single wire was all that held his camera to the hull. It was no longer live, but it held him to the hull; thank Rassilon the other end was tangled securely around Yahlas’ foot.

 

 

Muttering a curse, he watched two of the bolts bolting down the camera’s posting twist out from their holes and fly under the weight of Yahlas’ body in the suit.

 

 

Soon, the camera would be dangling in space. It wouldn’t take long for the damn thing to break off from that wire, and then he’d really be sorry.

 

 

Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn.

 

 

Stupid Time Lord.

 


	10. Chapter 10

From the safety of the no.15 cam, Yahlas watched the no. 14 cam pan toward the no. 7 with disdain, her impulses crackling with fury.

 

 

“Yahs, you’ve really gone and made things difficult, but no matter,” she mused, repositioning her own cam again so that she could see the 7th, “I will save the Doctor, this ship, and his little boyfriend. All from you.”

 

 

Encoding a message in a mass of observational relay data from cam 15, she sent a warning to the Doctor in the no. 7 cam:

 

 

“Danger; (he) means to kill you. Been watching. Get out now.”

 

 

The Doctor sent back,

 

 

“Which one? Are you sure you’ve got it right? This camera is about to come free of the hull, and there’s something you should see here.”

 

 

“Yes sir. Sure as anything. He is coming after you. Run, sir. Run! Forget my body. The no. 15 cam sent a release signal to the cam you’re inhabiting- I just watched the bolts spin off their settings. You must leave it now, before it detaches completely!”

 

 

“Can’t do that, Grasshopper,” the Doctor sent, blinking the camera on and off.

 

 

“Idiot! I said he’s watching you!”

 

 

The camera blinked again.

 

 

“I know.”

 

 

***

 

 

Yahs watched from his own camera with a burgeoning interest. Surely Yahlas didn’t believe the Doctor would fall for it? Yahlas had clearly attacked the no. 7 cam! It was there in the record!

 

 

He angled his cam toward the no. 15, bouncing the signal off and landing it squarely in the near-dead receptor of the 7th camera.

 

 

“Doctor, I know you saw her do it; you accessed the camera you’re trapped in, yes? What did you see?”

 

 

The Doctor tapped out a signal of his own again, this time to answer both of them at once, but a suspicious static interference ate his words.

 

 

“You two need… calm down, don’t duke it out… me. Just… listen! The pirates… let… captain… Sleepers all died! Yahs, you’re…”

 

 

Just then, the no. 7 camera shivered, knocking the wire loose from the camera’s sleek frame; the no. 7 cam flew away from the hull, whipping wildly but still attached, if only by grace of a dead woman’s corpse in a thousand year old space suit.

 


	11. Chapter 11

The little bits of Jack were sizzling on the floor of the crèche room.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Occasionally, a little light would flow back and forth between the pieces of seared Time Agent meat, buzzing back and forth with a blue pulse that screamed through the cells with the cold burn of mercury.

 

 

Back and forth.

 

 

Back and forth.

 

 

Back and forth.

 

 

One by one, the bits of flesh began to attract each other, crawling toward their partners in a grisly dance, trailing nothing behind them as they edged closer to becoming whole again.

 

 

Ghostly claws soon coalesced over Jack’s hands, followed by a crowd of thick carapace around the chunked midsection… while foggy mandibles chittered over his mouth, forming even as his teeth jumped back into his jaw and his muscles rewove themselves.

 

 

“Find them!” the many voices of the pirates sang from his mouth in a numb, mindless chorus, “no one leaves this ship alive!”

 

 

His possessed eyes, one still dangling from the left socket by a bunch of nerve fibers, settled on Yahlas, still wearing the Doctor’s body in the crèche.

 

 

He looked down at his unfamiliar hands, confused for a moment to find soft pink flesh rather than the hard white sleekness of keratin, but then he smiled, curled his fingers into fists, and reached into the crèche, tangling his hands in the Doctor’s sweat-drenched hair.

 

 

“Wakey, wakey, little man,” the pirates screamed from Jack’s throat.

 

 

Then he heaved, pouring more of the sick grey fog into the effort.

 

 

Soon, tendrils became tentacles, and tentacles became writhing thick coils of grey-blue ectoplasm, all pulling at the Time Lord in the crèche, and perhaps Yahlas with him, every tube, every wire, every panel, booming out in a blast of flesh and bone and metal and showers of cold silvery fluid.

 

 

A thick wet plop, a splash of mercury, dark blood raising bruises on the pale skin, all ended in a crash, and déjà vu.

 

 

He reached in again, pulling on the power coupling supplying the creche, the last barricade to his revenge on the bitch who had killed them. Him? Them.

 

 

His body shot back against a wall as the great tube tore, sparking fiercely, and a vision of a blue box in a large darkened area deep below the Drive Chamber filled their thoughts.

 

 

Yes… escape… they would escape in the box… but what had been down there? They’d never had a chance to reach that room, till now. There would be an access in the Sleeper Chamber, though- every Xja ship had one. And they had been Xja, once, before the bitch Yahlas had organized the normal Xja against them. Before she’d built the crèche as a defense against the dark surety of their raids.

 

 

Jack laughed his way down the hall to the Chamber of the Sleepers, his throat humming with a thousand clicks and cackles, body churning with the sweet revenge of a thousand dead pirates, warmed at the thought of the destruction they would soon wreak in the room below.

 


	12. Chapter 12

A soft white shadow spilled into the doorway of the Sleeper Chamber, blocking Jack’s way with a snowy, claw-filled fog.

 

 

The fog thickened and condensed down, becoming a small young Xja. He outstretched his claw, and pointed it wide at the Time Agent.

 

 

“The Lord will be displeased if you do not release his partner,” Yahs murmured, as his mandibles coalesced from the fog.

 

 

Jack beat his fist against a wall panel, denting it in as dark silver fog blew slowly out from his mouth, filling the hallway.

 

 

The pirates turned Jack’s head up toward Yahs, wrenching his neck muscles so harshly the veins in his neck strained.

 

 

“You are freed from our control, little shadow,” they screeched, drawing blood from Jack’s mouth with the force of their speech, “and no longer under our protection from Yahlas. Now go and die with the rest of your kin, a fragment of life, as you were born!”

 

 

Yahs held the door, thickening his own essence against the onslaught of the pirates possessing Jack’s body. But doubt still held him in its claws, sharp, blood-hungry, slamming into him again and again, nibbling away.

 

 

“The captain contacted us… told us the Time Lord had constructed the crèche as a focus for the Sleepers, to use their power to repair the ship and power it after the Drive collapse… he said that it was a blasphemy and must fail, that the Xja had been doomed for leaving in the first place. We wanted to junk it for parts at first, but the ship was so… full of walking meat, we had to make a slight detour around the larder before turning our attention to the matter of the Time Lord and her crèche! We realized it could be utilized, so we used it, but didn’t have a chance to destroy it once we were done converting ourselves with it until the Doctor came. So we kept you fighting the Time Lord woman’s data ghost as insurance, you- the manifest emanation of those pitiful Sleepers! And then we took their place, filling your little white head with false records and tales about the Time Lord woman’s treachery. Too bad the captain had already emptied and sealed the egg chamber… all those tiny soft heads would have proved a rich dessert! And your precious Lord can do nothing to save them.”

 

 

The cackling laughter of hundreds of pirates swarmed over Yahs, and his shivering fog-limbs melted away from the door like little bits of melting snow.

 

 

As he retreated into the Chamber itself, his fog-body turning to thinning vapors in the air, Yahs looked up at the Sleepers in the tombs with the truth bright in his eyes, at last.

 

 

At last, he remembered. Grief like a mountainous tide spilled over him, trembling his misty carapace and sinking him to the floor.

 

 

At last. If only he could remain awake long enough to convince Yahlas in time… or reach the Doctor.

 

 


	13. Chapter 13

“A little…more…” the Doctor urged, channeling power from the main ship to the cam he was trapped in once more, shoving at the thing with a last bright burst of enthusiasm.

 

 

At this latest onslaught, the cam shivered, shook, and moved to the left.

 

 

Whirrrr-katwik!

 

 

Whirrrrrr…

 

 

Kikik!

 

 

Whirrr…

 

 

A familiar face, wrapped in silver droplets and death, shimmied its way abruptly onto his viewing screen.

 

 

“Gaaah!” the Doctor cried, sending the camera lens spinning away from the sight.

 

 

The suit with Yahlas’ body in it must have got free! Although he’d hoped for a more suitable re-entry for the both of them than dueling cameras and a prayer to the gods of space irony.

 

 

“Sorry, Yahlas,” he murmured, as he yanked again with the camera, lassoing a receptor coil near the top right curve of the hull, near camera 15, “I’m going to have to borrow your body…”

 

 

Slowly, so slowly, he sent out waves of himself, golden tendrils of life force that tried to run up the cord attaching the suit to the ship. He concentrated, weaving gold into every fiber of the cord, forcing more and more controlled, focused essence up the wiring and into the suit.

“Just… a little more… and I’ve… damn!”

 

 

The suit jiggled between its moorings, jostling his threads of life energy out of sync with the cord as he felt himself tumble back and forth inside the camera.

 

 

It was an odd sensation, like being in a room filling slowly with water, then feeling that room shift sideways, the water sloshing against you for a tiny second.

 

 

He thought about it for a few minutes, taking in the way the camera seemed to sway back and forth, that awful screech. The patient, casual scraping. The pizzeria lens flare. Then he realized…

 

 

The camera was moving, not the suit. Dangling by a single wire… he’d forgotten.

 

 

“Well, I always wanted to try a loft!” he reasoned, before sending all of himself down through the cord, riding a rainbow of gold through tubes and tunnels and twists of roiling silver, “this is so much cooler than that weekend I spent housesitting for Tronnnnnn!”

 


	14. Chapter 14

In a furious spattering of camera 14’s thick glass lens, Yahlas dropped out of the cam and into the ship’s main lines again, careening through the wires, a golden missile of death heading for the clicking sounds of Yahs’s traitor feet against the floors of the Xja ship.

 

 

Yahs ran screaming through endless hallways, past the ruined mess hall door, hanging there only by its sliding interface, over a broken pile of nest material crates, scrambled over top of a loose pipe spitting cold mercury over a section of the ventilation wing’s flooring tiles.

 

 

The man was possessed by the pirates. He had to stop him, had to kill Jack Harkness.

 

 

What he hadn’t counted on, as he sped through the passageways rank with old Xja dust and mercury stains, was Yahlas slamming into him, full force, the Doctor’s young body a battering ram in her able hands as she grabbed him with the full strength of a Time Lord, ripping at his mandibles, clawing at his carapace, her feet hooked around his double spine, her body still dripping silver from ejection wounds.

 

 

His back shot through with pain, and he became fog again, enveloping her golden hatred with bluish whitish tendrils of half-life, old and cold and bereft of the heat of real living.

 

 

“I have been a specter too long, Time Lord! You must listen to me! Your battle is not with me, it is with the pirates!”

 

 

Yahlas plunged the Doctor’s hand, her hand, now, like a blade into his ephemeral misty form, the gold melting some of the blue, the blue burning some of the gold into acidic green smoke.

 

 

“You murdered your own kind, the Sleepers! You! I watched you outside on the hull, just now, attacking the Doctor! You trapped him in that camera and then murdered him, just like you stashed my body, within distance of the backup recording. You murdered me before I could reach it! Now die and rid this ship of your presence so I can return the Doctor’s body to his…”

 

 

But a desperate, shaky voice came over the coms then, followed by a strange tonal sequence of banged out notes…

 

 

“Guhhhhh. Guuuuh!”

 

 

Bang-baaaaang-bang!

 

 

Bang-baaaaang-bang!

 

 

“It’s a message!” Yahs clicked aloud, becoming reconstitute just long enough to scrape a white claw over the safety release on the nearby blast door, revealing the long-window view of an outside catwalk used for maintenance.

 

 

There, crumpled like a soggy croissant, a space suit hovered dirty and occupied, arms wrapped around the railings, clinging and shivering in the cold. Old eyes fluttered in the stained and frosty faceplate, old, and familiar. And alive, gloriously alive. Yahlas’ eyes. But Yahlas was…. inside.

 

 

“What? Rassilon’s Rod, you… were telling the truth? Oh. Well go out there and get him!”

 

 


	15. Chapter 15

“Sir!” Yahlas cried, turning the Doctor’s head toward her own as Yahs pulled her body out of the space suit, “they’re blocking me!”

 

 

The Doctor looked out from Yahlas’ rotted eyes and nodded. Her flesh was dry, wrinkled and dead, but waiting, like the vampire on Ahkaten.

 

 

“I’m aware, Yahlas! If they try to block me, they’ll get a surprise- my data ghost has better encryption and a way cooler firewall. Let me just… update your…”

 

 

But Jack Harkness appeared in the blast door just as Yahs tried to close it, and slammed at him, knocking the Xja emanation out of phase.

 

 

Yahs’s misty body sailed toward a section wall, but his claw manifested again in mid-flight clutching a corner of broken door, dragging him back into corporeal space.

 

 

“Yahlas, he’s heading for the Doctor!” he clicked, his white mantis head cocking at her as his big eyes flitted back and forth between her and the Doctor, gleaming in the near dark brought on by the burst lighting.

 

 

“Doctor, are you strong enough? Give me your hand,” Yahlas yelled, summoning a blast of golden light and blowing it from the Doctor’s fingertips toward the oncoming Time Agent, his mouth ringed by wisps of sharp, petulant grey- the telltale sign of the pirates.

 

 

“Hey, that’s my starstuff you’re spilling!” the Doctor squeaked with Yahlas’ half-fermented throat, but he worked himself through her veins anyway, using the jumpstart of fear to fire her engines and cut through the blocks placed on her powers by the pirates.

 

 

“My god, you ‘don’t’ have much left, do you, sir?” she coughed, considering the dangerously deplete amount of artron in the Doctor’s body as she waved at Yahs.

 

 

While Yahlas reassessed the Doctor’s resources, Pirate Jack took a swipe with a tendril-y hand at the Doctor’s head then reached back to grab Yahlas’ throat.

 

 

“I’ll be frugal- hold on! Yahs, aren’t you hungry? Get them!”

 

 

“What? Oh. Oh! Yes, yes I will…”

 

 

Aging his appearance to an adult Xja for size advantage, Yahs pushed off the doorway and surrounded the pirates, enveloping Jack’s body in a bright blue-white aura-bubble.

 

 

Yahlas grabbed her body by the wrist, and a sliver of gold sparked from the Doctor’s body to hers, and from hers to the Doctor’s.

 

 

Then she pressed her own crispy, dry hand to Jack’s chest as Yahs made a hole in the protective envelop of his essence for her, and…

 

 

Her body gleamed with gold and shimmered once, dissolving in a halo of molten jewel tones. Then in a burst, grey sick smoke flooded out of Jack and into Yahs. Yahs spiraled his essence, tunneling, coiling, merging with the screaming emanation of the pirates. Then their cries faded into sneers and whimpers, and finally sighs. They were gone.

 

 


	16. Chapter 16

The Doctor got up unsteadily from the floor and leaped to hold Jack up, but the Time Agent collapsed over top of him, pulling him down in a sweaty heap of naked, bloody time traveler.

 

 

“Is he all right?” Yahs asked softly, indicating the two men with a clicking claw.

 

 

 

“I should think not. Those types never are, but it’s all right. Concentrate on your own nest; it’s what got you in this mess in the first place… not doing that, I mean.”

 

 

Yahs turned to see Yahlas, and instead, there was a beautiful female adult Xja with short white tufts of hair on her tall head, and a tight, long thorax… long, elegant sharp legs, and perfectly feathered feelers. Her slightly damp body bounced with health as she moved- she was a goddess.

 

 

“Yahlas!” he clicked hoarsely, and sank low, wiggling briefly as he gave his mating keen.

 

 

But he dropped out of phase and slipped through the floor, falling to the egg chamber catwalk far below with a clang.

 

 

“Well, that was anticlimactic… better go and fix it. You two going to be okay?” Yahlas clicked, cocking her head at her fellow Time Lord, who was busy with Jack’s head in his lap, running fingers through his hair.

 

 

“Erm, have you got enough boost to reach Stellaxa 27, Yahlas?” the Doctor murmured, barely looking up, “you should be able to repair the ship with parts from there.”

 

 

Yahlas clicked her mouth open in a wide Xja smile.

 

 

“Yes; mating with Yahs down below should refill the egg chamber, and give us enough power to remake the ship. Plus, I’ve got regenerative energy to spare; that should help with difficult to find materials till we reach Stellaxa. Go take your pet to the TARDIS and get some sleep. But come visit us, or I’ll tell your wife. All right, sir?”

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                           The Doctor gulped, his hand momentarily stilling in its address of Jack’s strangely soft brown hair. “How the hell do ‘you’ know about ‘that’? Ah, it doesn’t matter. Yeah, I will, I will. Go on, you! Just don’t torture the poor man.”

 

 

As Yahlas wandered off to find a lift down to the egg chamber, she called back, “That goes for you too, sir.”

 

 

Her mantid eyes, large and lavender, glinted at him. Then she was gone.

 

 

The Doctor just sighed, and kept petting Jack’s hair, feeling the man’s body warming finally despite the mercury-induced cool of the Xja ship’s air return.

 

 

“You know, Jack, if you help me get you to the TARDIS, I’ll dip myself in chocolate, and we can make babies… do you wanna?”

 

 

Then the Time Lord, chin on chest, peered over the spot where Jack’s head lay nestled against his naked lower ribcage and upper belly, and, upon seeing his friend’s subconscious approval rising between loose legs, he allowed a secret smile to plaster itself over his lips, and continued petting.

 

 

“Well this scrawny heap of Time Agent isn’t going to move itself, you great lump! Kick it into high gear or I’ll have to take drastic measures!” he groaned into Jack’s ears before looking down again, “Are you even listening to me?”

 

 

“Are you serious?” Jack murmured, half-asleep as the Doctor got out from under him and stood up, pretending to be exasperated.

 

 

“Am I… oh for Rassilon’s sake! Get up and kiss me! I’m thinking twins, maybe triplets… quads? Do you think my hips are too narrow? Maybe I should regenerate into a girl… or an octopus! Always love an octopus, me, although there was this one time when I got knocked up at Cthulhu’s after-party…” the Doctor teased, swinging his pelvis this way and that, gesticulating pointedly with his hands as he made a great show of dancing away from Jack’s grasp, edging ever so slightly toward a left-hand corridor.

 

 

Jack jumped to his feet, stretched arms, rolled shoulders. Then he took the Doctor’s hands and pulled him close in a kiss, saying, “Darling, shut up and love the bomb.”

 

 

The Time Agent’s fingers pointed down another corridor, where he’d found the TARDIS, laughing as he took the Time Lord by the hips and propelled him in that direction.

 

 

End


End file.
